Portrait Photography Tips – Progress Through a Session

Since I have a following of photographers as well as potential portrait clients, I thought this post on portrait photography tips might be of interest to them, even though it’s been several months since I had this session. I hope that the rest of you find this post of interest to some extent. 🙂

I got a call to do a shoot for two new recording artists that are putting together some singles. There was a film crew capturing behind the scenes footage as well as two hostesses to interview the recording artists, musicians and the music producer. I’ve been to this particular studio before, and the challenge for me was to find new places to shoot.  Towards the end, I was asked to shoot one of the interviewers, and I was already out of ideas. She wanted to do something with the piano and, while I wasn’t thrilled with the idea I was kind of relieved because I had nothing else in mind.

Anyway, here’s a series of how I “progressed” through this portrait session.

This is the first portrait I did shortly after my light test. The side light is too hot for me, but it was already at minimum output and my tripod (the best tool I had to allow the background lights to properly expose) was back in my car. An assistant would have come in handy, but I went solo this day, so I just left it at that.

In my next image, I chose to have her face away from the piano. Having her face this way made it easier to deal with my hot side light. But I still wasn’t too thrilled, so we moved on to something else.

The challenge of where this piano was situated was that behind it was a corner on which large mirrors spanned the width and height of the adjacent walls. That meant I had to be pretty tight with my composition; otherwise I’d have some very ugly things in my picture, not to mention my light sources and worse yet, me.  This is partly the reason I chose to shoot from a low angle.

In the following shot, I had her lie down on the piano, and I stood on the chair to shoot her from above, again mostly because of the reflections in the mirror.

While she was on her back, we noticed a large mirror on the ceiling — something I didn’t notice before. The ceilings are high, and I guess I never looked up.  So with her in the same spot, I sat on the floor and shot her reflection.

I shot so many images of her reflection that I started to cramp up from being in awkward positions. I was about to call it a wrap, and then I figured I’d do just one more setup. Once again, we stayed on the piano, and I photographed her reflection in the mirror on the wall. Of course, I had to include her “real” body in the picture to show that it was a reflection.

So there you have it — a typical progression through a portrait session. Total elapsed time was 31 minutes. 🙂

Most of my private commissions are shot using natural light, so in those situations there’s actually more variety in the same amount of time because I don’t have to deal with rearranging lights and measuring them.